Microsoft to kill HealthVault Insights app from the iOS, Android and Windows stores

In February last year, Microsoft announced several new health care related initiatives and solutions including HealthVault Insights. HealthVault Insights is a research-based project designed to generate new insights about patient health, drive adherence to care plans and encourage patient engagement powered by machine learning. It brings together data from various sources including apps and devices, via the Apple Health and Google Fit services, as well as patient medical records.

Microsoft has now announced that they are going to remove HealthVault Insights mobile apps from iOS, Android and Windows Stores later this month. However, the good news is that the data users generated in HealthVault Insights will be accessible via the HealthVault website. They have mentioned the following reason on their website.

We launched HealthVault Insights as a research project last year, with the goal of helping patients generate new insights about their health. Since then, we’ve learned a lot about how machine learning can be used to increase patient engagement and are now applying that knowledge to other projects.

HealthVault Insights apps had the following features:

• Personal analytics: Applies machine learning on both unique individual trends and across populations, increasing learning for the patient and provider
• Cross-platform support: Works with iOS, Android, and Windows Phone and connects seamlessly with Apple Health and Google Fit
• Medical records access: Fingertip access to all of a patient’s health records in HealthVault
• Engagement platform: Enables personalization and notifications to increase patient engagement with their provider
• Action plans framework: Providers can leverage the HealthVault Insights action plans framework to quickly customize and distribute care plans to their patients
• Cortana integration: Connect Cortana to see how patients’ calendar and location may be impacting their health
• Activity feed: Show summaries of patient activities, including device data and trends, in a single feed, enabling a new level of learning

Few years ago, Google killed their Health service and asked its users to migrate their to Microsoft’s health service. By killing the mobile apps, Microsoft has now almost killed the HealthVault service. In my opinion, providing a way to access the health data through a website is not a replacement for a full fledged mobile app. I really hope Microsoft partners with some other health service provider and offers a way for users to migrate their data so that they can enjoy a complete health service.